Digital intelligence blog

Google: We're not a big healthcare company... yet

Alphabet's Eric Schmidt on where his company currently sits within the life sciences landscape

Published earlier this year, Connected World explores the consequences of the digital age, moving with ease from the death of privacy to the rise of artificial intelligence.

For its ‘in conversation’ format author Philip Larrey, the chair of logic at the Pontifical Lateran University, speaks to a cast of luminaries that includes Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt and WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell.

It’s the interview with Schmidt that is particularly pertinent for these pages, not least given a recent EY report, which concludes: “Make no mistake: technology firms, wellness companies and other non-traditional players awash in consumer and patient data are encroaching on traditional biopharmaceutical territory.”

What does Schmidt say about this in Connected World? “We are now working not on drugs, but on devices,” he tells Larrey. Google’s healthcare ambitions - at least for now - are as a ‘research and development shop’. “We use computer technology to make medicine more reliable,” he says. However, when asked whether it could become a big healthcare company that conducts its own large-scale trials, he answers “maybe in the future”.

It’s another reminder of the role for non-traditional players will play tomorrow’s world.